Researchers calculate the cost of CO₂ emissions, call for carbon tax

Researchers are calling on policymakers to encourage the transition from coal-based electricity production to a system based on natural gas through a carbon tax.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Mental health woes grow while spending declines, study finds

As the current global economic crisis drives up the demand for mental health-care services, cash-strapped agencies are slashing mental health budgets, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Toward a new generation of superplastics

Scientists are reporting an in-depth validation of the discovery of the world's first mass producible, low-cost, organoclays for plastics. The powdered material, made from natural clay, would be a safer, more environmentally friendly replacement for the compound widely used to make plastics nanocomposites.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Morning test helps doctors save kidneys

A morning urine test is superior to all other tests for detecting declining kidney performance in patients with diabetic kidney disease, according to a new study. The results suggest that clinicians should monitor kidney function by measuring the albumin:creatinine ratio from a first morning urine sample.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

3-D gesture-based interaction system unveiled

Touch screens such as those found on the iPhone or iPad are the latest form of technology allowing interaction with smart phones, computers and other devices. However, scientists in Germany have developed the next generation non-contact gesture and finger recognition system. The novel system detects hand and finger positions in real-time and translates these into appropriate interaction commands. Furthermore, the system does not require special gloves or markers and is capable of supporting multiple users.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Light and moderate physical activity reduces the risk of early death, study finds

A new study has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduced the risk of early death.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 6:00 pm

Graphene oxide gets green: Environmentally friendly ways to make it in bulk, break it down

Scientists have found a way to synthesize graphene oxide in bulk in an environmentally friendly way, eliminating toxic and explosive chemicals from the process. They have also found a class of common bacteria breaks down graphene oxide into environmentally benign graphene.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Starve a cancer: Calorie restriction as an anti-invasive therapy for malignant brain cancer

Researchers have found that reducing calorie intake can restrict the growth and spread of brain cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Sea lamprey research sheds light on how stress hormones evolved

Researchers are have identified a stress hormone in the sea lamprey, using the 500 million-year-old species as a model to understand the evolution of the endocrine system.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Test could predict which children with T-cell ALL are best candidates for clinical trials

A genetic clue uncovered by scientists enables doctors to predict, for the first time, which children with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) are unlikely to benefit from standard chemotherapy for the disease and should therefore be among the first to receive new treatments in future clinical trials.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Ships head back to oil well, ready to resume work (AP)

AP - Ships were getting back in place Sunday at the Gulf of Mexico site of BP's leaky oil well as crews raced to resume work on plugging the gusher before another big storm stops work again.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 2:02 am

Preparations for BP well 'kill' operation move forward (AFP)

AFP - Engineers moved ahead Sunday with preparations for a well "kill" operation that officials hope will permanently plug the oil leak causing the worst US environmental disaster.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jul 2010 | 1:27 am

BP boss 'could resign within days' (AFP)

AFP - The boss of troubled oil giant BP, Tony Hayward, is poised to quit within days, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 11:20 pm

China warns of more rain in flood-hit areas (AFP)

AFP - Chinese weather authorities warned of more rain on Sunday in some of the areas worst hit by floods that have so far left at least 1,100 people dead or missing.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 10:55 pm

BP resuming oil spill work as storm fizzles (Reuters)

Reuters - Ships and workers moved back into BP Plc's Gulf of Mexico oil spill site on Sunday as seas calmed, and BP could begin pumping mud into the blown-out well later this week in a bid to plug the gusher.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 10:54 pm

Senate Panel Cuts Commercial Spaceship Funding for NASA (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - WASHINGTON — A Senate panel approved a $19 billion NASA budget Wednesday that would cut in half the U.S. space agency's 2011 request for a new commercial crew initiative while pumping an unsought $3 billion into continued development of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and a heavy-lift rocket needed to launch it into deep space.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 9:15 pm

My bright idea: Daniel Simons

In a seminal experiment, Daniel Simons and fellow psychologist Christopher Chabris discovered a phenomenon that forces us to question how our brains perceive the world

Before reading any further, you are advised to watch the short video above, which shows a seminal experiment that Daniel Simons and his co-author and fellow psychologist Christopher Chabris conducted more than a decade ago (further examples can be found here). It is an experiment that any viewer can take part in – with often startling results. It opened up to the two American professors the phenomenon of "inattentional blindness", alerting them to the many tricks that our brains routinely play on all of us.

If you are reading on, Simons reveals more about the gorilla.

Tell me more about your experiment.

The study that inspired the name of our book was one that Chris Chabris and I did about a dozen years ago, and it was based on some much earlier work by our colleague Ulric Neisser from the 70s. It was a fairly simple study, really.

We had people watch a video in which three people were wearing white shirts and passing a basketball and the only task was to count how many times the players passed the ball. We made it a little harder by having the players fake some passes and move around each other and bounce the ball and dribble it. We also had three people wearing black shirts passing their own ball, but you were only supposed to count how many times the players wearing white passed the ball.

About halfway through the video we had a person wearing a gorilla suit walk into the scene, walk to the middle of the scene, turn to face the camera, thump its chest and then walk off, a total of about nine seconds later.

What we found was that when the people were busy counting the number of passes by the players wearing white, about half the people didn't see the gorilla at all; when we showed it to them later, they were shocked. They accused us of rewinding the tape or switching the video that we showed them. It's surprising to people because we have the strong intuition that if something unexpected and distinctive happens right in front of us, we will automatically notice it. People who saw the gorilla couldn't believe that anyone could miss it and the people who missed it were shocked that they had missed it, as it was so counterintuitive to them.

What does this say about how our brains process the world around us?

Well, several things. One is that we don't actually see as much of the world as we think we see. We're very good at focusing our attention on a limited aspect of the world: we focus our attention on a few things that we want to see and the result of that is that we have to filter out things that we don't care about. And we sometimes also filter out things that we might care about.

This is known as inattentional blindness. The idea is that if you're not focusing attention on something, you often don't consciously perceive it; what's interesting is that our intuitions about this sort of failure of awareness are often wrong.

We've known about these sorts of failures of awareness for years, but if you make it such a vivid thing that people are astonished that they could miss it, it reveals what we intuitively believe we see as opposed to what we actually see. We think we are going to notice anything important that happens in front of us but the reality is that we don't much of the time. Things actually don't grab our attention.

From an evolutionary point of view, does this make sense – to not notice a predator right in front of you, for instance?

If you think about what sort of resources it would take to notice everything in our environment, while at the same time being able to focus intently on the things that we care about, it would take a tremendous amount of resources. We need to be able to focus on what matters and not necessarily on things that are distracting. We don't care if there are leaves blowing in the distance, if we're focusing on an animal on the scene.

So there's some reason to think it makes sense to build a system that uses focused attention this way. But if you also think about it, evolutionary, it was a much simpler time. You're moving at pedestrian speeds... and if you don't spot something for a few seconds, it's not going to matter most of the time. Whereas if you're driving at 100km an hour and someone walks out into the street, it matters if you don't notice, even for a fraction of a second.

Can you give other examples of this?

Everybody, at some point in their life, has spotted an error in a movie: somebody's wearing a jacket, and then they're not... or somebody is eating a pastry and then they're eating a pancake. These errors creep into movies because they're filmed over many days, out of sequence, and cut together later in the editing room....

I have had people saying that they are great at spotting these editing mistakes, but I can sit them down in front of a one-minute movie I made with a colleague that has nine intentional errors in it and they don't spot any.

Why do we have this intuition that we spot all of them? Well, it's a lot like the gorilla case. We're only aware of those things we've noticed, and we're not aware of all the ones we've missed. So if you spot a continuity error, you'll remember that you noticed it, but you won't remember all the ones you never saw. But people tend to generalise from the cases they're aware of and assume that they notice all of them. It's detecting a pattern... but only getting half the evidence.

The Invisible Gorilla is published by HarperCollins. To hear more of this interview, listen to the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Jul 2010 | 5:04 pm

Doomsday scenarios: is humanity prepared for the worst?

Designer viruses, potent new weapons, hurtling asteroids... all have the potential to obliterate humanity. So how do scientists plan for such catastrophes?

Corridors are deserted. Office doors are locked. Laboratories are quieter than usual. It can mean only one thing: conference season is upon us and it's time for scientists to shut up shop and take to the road, if only for a few days.

For more than a thousand physicists, the destination last week was the Palais de Congrès in Paris, an enormous 1970s construction of jutting concrete and angled glass. Until Wednesday, the centre will host one of the most eagerly awaited meetings on the scientific calendar. The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) has an impressive track record as the place where new discoveries are announced, but this time around there is an extra buzz in the air.

This is the first year that physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, will join researchers from other laboratories in unveiling their latest results. Talks at the meeting will cover a vast range of topics, from the performance of the LHC and other accelerators to quirks of the laws of nature and the hunt for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle said to give mass to the building blocks of nature.

One topic that will definitely not be discussed, at least not seriously, is whether the LHC might just destroy the planet. Thanks to a few vocal doomsayers and a run of unsuccessful legal cases, the exotic idea has become lodged in the public consciousness. It has probably done more to raise Cern's profile than anything in the laboratory's recent history.

Wild claims about the risks of the LHC received blanket coverage from the world's media in the run-up to the machine being switched on last year. The nature of the catastrophe took on several guises. We heard that a black hole might appear beneath the Swiss countryside and steadily devour the Earth. Maybe planet-crunching entities called "strangelets" could pop into existence and reduce our hospitable rock to a sizzling ball no wider than Lord's cricket ground. Or the universe might "collapse" into a more stable state, wiping out life here and anywhere else it might lurk in the process (see below). Each of these scenarios, and more besides, were argued by a small number of concerned individuals to be clear and present dangers to humanity.

The Large Hadron Collider is not the first particle accelerator to be framed as a doomsday machine. Particle physicists have been accused of gambling with the future of humanity since at least the 1950s, when forerunners of the LHC were being built. Mention world-ending scenarios to staff on the LHC, or its main competitor, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, and you can expect a roll of the eyes at best. Physicists have gone to great pains to explain why such fears are unfounded. The time could have been better spent by getting on with research.

Scientists have good reason to be weary of fanciful speculation over the safety of their experiments, but some academics claim there are valuable lessons to be learned from the LHC experience, ones that could save us from more realistic catastrophes before the century is out. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, says that advances in fields such as weapons technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology (which has already given researchers the tools to create viruses from scratch) could lead to what he calls "existential threats". These are catastrophes that play out on an unprecedented scale, ones that have the potential to bring an end to the human story, either by wiping us out completely, or by "permanently and drastically destroying our future potential".

The creation of a lethal synthetic virus that kills on a global scale is but one potential risk that Bostrom highlights. Breakthroughs in physics could lead to new weapons that increase the dangers of war, he says, while advances in computing could see the advent of machines that can improve their own intelligence, and surpass that of humans. Even attempts to manipulate the atmosphere to combat global warming might backfire and trigger a global disaster.

Bostrom says the LHC should be seen as a test case, used by society to learn how to deal with events and technologies that may genuinely threaten our existence in the future. "So far, we haven't done very well, but events surrounding the LHC could stimulate us into getting our act together for next time, when the threats need to be taken more seriously," he says. "I think the danger from particle accelerators is extremely small, but there will be other areas that will cause major existential risks and we need to learn how to deal with these situations in a rational way."

Existential threats are nothing new. Schoolchildren learn that an asteroid strike wiped out three quarters of Earth's species 65m years ago and promptly ended the reign of the dinosaurs. There have been at least four other mass extinctions, each one the result of an epic natural disaster. The point that intrigues researchers such as Bostrom is that society is bad at identifying dangers such as these, and even worse at preparing for them. In an essay published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2002, Bostrom expressed dismay at how little research has been done on serious threats to humanity, writing: "There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks." Little has changed since, he says.

A major sticking point, says Bostrom, is that humans are doomed only to learn from direct experience. Nuclear reactors were made safer after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The UN drew up plans for a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean a year after 230,000 people died from a devastating wave in 2004. Plans to bolster flood defences around New Orleans are still being thrashed out, five years after hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 and left thousands more homeless. In each case, the risks were known, but they were only acted on after the event.

"Our attitude throughout human history has been to experience events like these and then put safeguards in place," says Bostrom. "That strategy is completely futile with existential risks. By definition, you don't get to learn from experience. You only have one chance to get it right."

One approach that has been used to clarify the nature and extent of a potentially dangerous situation involves setting up a panel of experts who understand the relevant science well enough to make an informed risk assessment. In 1999, the US physicist John Marburger III was director of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. The lab is home to a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That summer, a puff piece on the machine in Scientific American magazine led to two letters that raised concerns over whether the machine might create a black hole or cause other untoward damage to the planet. Marburger immediately convened a panel of leading physicists to work through every doomsday scenario they could think of and assess the risk of them happening. The panel concluded the machine was safe after drawing on the fact that more violent particle collisions caused by cosmic rays slamming into planets, stars and clouds of dust and gas have occurred in nature for billions of years. At Cern, a similar safety review of the LHC, the construction of which had only just begun, reached the same conclusion.

The safety reviews at Brookhaven and Cern were largely public relations exercises. Governments never considered pulling the plug on either machine, and courts dismissed legal challenges that sought injunctions on the colliders. But the reviews highlighted what some perceived to be a shortcoming of scientific panels. They could be seen as highly partial: particle physicists ruling on the safety of particle accelerators might well have a vested interest in the projects going ahead.

Soon after the fuss broke, Francesco Calogero, an Italian physicist and former secretary general of Pugwash, an organisation that pursues ways to reduce threats to global security, championed an alternative way of deciding how risky an experiment might be. In a paper entitled, "Might a laboratory experiment destroy planet Earth?", he backed for a more adversarial approach to risk analysis. Instead of one panel of experts, there should be two. The first, the blue team, makes the case for the experiment's safety, while the red team does its best to emphasise the dangers. The two then come together and decide whose arguments are the most robust.

"It is not perfect, but I think it is the best strategy," says Calogero. "It overcomes any perceived vested interest and gives people the chance to point out arguments that are not watertight and what might go wrong."

Others argue that decisions over the fate of humanity are too important to be left to panels of scientists. Richard Posner, a US appeals court judge and author of the 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response, wants an Office of Risk and Catastrophe set up in the White House. The office would be charged with identifying potentially dangerous technologies and calling in experts to inform its own risk assessments. "The problem right now is that no single government department takes responsibility for these kinds of situations," he says.

An international network of such offices could go a long way to improving global security, Posner says, but the idea is controversial. "Done well, it could be extremely valuable, but there are many ways it might end up being politicised or compromised," says Bostrom.

According to Robert Crease, head of philosophy at the State University of New York and author of the 2006 book The Philosophy of Expertise, our best hope for surviving existential threats is to train scientists as best we can and trust them to police themselves.

"You don't want a committee of people who don't have expertise trying to review the expertise of people who do. That doesn't improve matters. As soon as you set up a committee, quarrels develop over who's a member, who's best and who has what hidden agenda. It's a disaster," he says.

"The optimal course of action, the best we can do, is to improve, in each discipline, the review panels and the institutions that guarantee expertise. It boils down to trust. We don't like to rely on it, but we do every day," he adds.

For physicists meeting in Paris this week, the focus will be on discoveries rather than doomsday scenarios, and for good reason. The fears raised over particle colliders such as the LHC belong firmly in the realm of science fiction. But there are important lessons to be learned from the LHC story that go beyond particle physics. We might be faced with truly catastrophic threats before the century is out, and to deal with them we need to change our way of thinking. Instead of waiting for disaster to strike before making life safer, we have to be one step ahead. Contrary to the doomsayers' fears, the LHC might help ensure the end is never nigh.

Ending it all: the threat to the entire universe

It has been called "the ultimate ecological catastrophe", but even these strong words fail to convey the true horror and finality of a grim kind of natural disaster known to physicists as "vacuum decay".

Forget pandemic viruses that wipe out humanity, asteroid strikes that devastate life on Earth and even black holes that devour the planet. Vacuum decay leaves the entire universe not only lifeless, but without any hope of life for ever more.

Vacuum decay, which is happily only a theoretical prospect, occurs when part of the universe is knocked into a more stable state than it exists in today. This creates a bubble of "true vacuum" that expands at the speed of light. As the bubble grows, it reduces the energy locked up in the vacuum of space and rewrites the laws of nature.

In 1980, the late Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman published calculations that showed for the first time that vacuum decay was eternally terminal. He wrote: "One could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."

Ian Sample's Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle is published by Virgin Books

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Jul 2010 | 5:04 pm

Tests begin on stem cell cure for rare heart disease

Cardiologists hope new treatment can prolong the lives of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy

Doctors are investigating whether patients with an irreversible heart condition can prolong their lives by having stem cells taken from their hip and injected into the damaged organ.

Experts at the Barts and the London Heart Attack Centre hope their work will lead to a major breakthrough for the UK's estimated 30,000 sufferers with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). The rare condition causes the heart muscle wall to become thin and floppy, making the heart progressively less able to pump blood around the body. Drug treatment can be of limited benefit, and ultimately patients deteriorate to the extent that they will die unless they receive a new heart.

Researchers led by consultant cardiologist Professor Anthony Mathur are about to start the world's first randomised control trial exploring whether stem cell therapy can repair the patient's heart. "We are using stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine to try to improve the heart's function and maybe prolong their lives," Mathur said. "These patients have such a poor prognosis, so it's very important for them to be exposed to a potential new therapy that might change the outcome of their condition."

He is recruiting 90 volunteers: half will have stem cells taken from the bone marrow of their hip and injected into their heart. The others will have their stem cells frozen and be given placebo injections, but will undergo the therapy if the trial is successful.

But Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said patients should not expect dramatic results soon. "At the moment, this is being done more in hope than expectation, because globally the fundamental science behind stem cells is not sufficiently mature for us to be confident of success."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Jul 2010 | 5:02 pm

Splice | Film review

Vincenzo Natali raises complex moral questions in this thriller about genetic engineering

Back in 1954 the Austrian social thinker Robert Jungk wrote a bestselling futurological study, the title of which, Tomorrow is Already Here, predicted the way science fact would be constantly breathing down the neck of science fiction as the 20th century proceeded. Something like this has been experienced during the long gestation of Splice, the third feature film by the Canadian writer-director Vincenzo Natali. Natali made his name in 1997 with Cube, an ingenious low-budget thriller set entirely within a maze of interlocking boxes from which a disparate group of prisoners attempt to escape. This allegory about bureaucracy and the human condition, clearly indebted to Poe, Kafka and Borges, was followed in 2003 by Cypher, a clever paranoid conspiracy thriller also set in the near future that anticipated Christopher Nolan's Inception. It starred Jeremy Northam as an anonymous brainwashed accountant trained in industrial espionage by a giant conglomerate to infiltrate computer companies.

Natali had apparently been thinking of an SF movie about genetic engineering while working on Cube and Cypher, but by the time he'd completed the script and found the backing for Splice the world had long since said hello to Dolly the sheep, and the results of the Human Genome Project had been announced to the world. From these events it is but a relatively small step into the future for his protagonists, Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley), a pair of biochemists working for a conventionally sinister pharmaceutical company with the acronymic name Nerd. Clive and Elsa are longtime lovers, a brilliant, ambitious, edgy couple who have, it transpires, deliberately put off having children while working on a project to create life in their clean, gleaming laboratory.

At last their research has produced two worm-like creatures dubbed Ginger and Fred, derived from the DNA of numerous species, which offer great boons to mankind in the form of miracle cures and the prospect of major financial gains to Nerd. They're disappointed, however, that their bosses insist upon exploiting the immediate commercial aspects of the discovery, and they secretly embark on further experiments, which involve the incorporation of human DNA into the cocktail. Playing God or perhaps providing practical proof for Darwin's theories takes them into a new and different world of complex moral and ethical choices, of hubris and horror, all of which Nicoli neatly paces from first innocent steps to outright terror and finally dark irony.

The names Ginger and Fred suggest something sexy and playful, but the consequences turn out to be more Walpurgis than waltz when Nerd's shareholders are invited to see the company's work-in-progress. There is also a signal given us by calling the scientists Clive and Elsa, a way, one assumes, of Natali indicating the forerunners of his central couple. Colin Clive was the actor who played Henry Frankenstein and Elsa Lanchester the actress who impersonated both Mary Shelley and the monster's bride, in James Whale's classic Universal Pictures horror movies of the 1930s.

The first stage of Clive and Elsa's journey results in a bouncing creature not unlike the one in Ridley Scott's Alien, with a sting in its prehensile tail but less slimy and toothy. Mother love overcomes Elsa's professional scruples, and as their offspring grows exponentially, it becomes a feminised figure, initially dressed in a party frock and given a teddy bear to hug. She's soon a sentient being, rather like a smart window dummy come to life, and is played by the striking French actress Delphine Chanéac. Galatea to the couple's Pygmalion, she can use Scrabble tiles to spell out words and after identifying the Nerd company as her home is given the name Dren. With growth, however, comes doubt and the inevitable discussion of aborting the experiment. In one of the picture's most shocking scenes an attempt at drowning reveals Dren to be amphibious.

When the pair take their creation to the wintry countryside to be kept in secret at the farm where Elsa was raised, matters go from bad to worst. As Dren metamorphoses she draws her makers into deviant, transgressive behaviour as parents, victims and lovers. What makes Dren so dangerously unpredictable is the human DNA she contains in her make-up, not that derived from animals.

With Splice Natali inevitably invites comparison with his fellow Canadian, David Cronenberg, who made his formidable reputation with "body-horror" films like Shivers and The Fly, tales involving appalling physical transformations that play on our fears of disease, decay and deformity. Natali doesn't quite make our flesh creep the way the cooler, more detached Cronenberg does, but he compels us to contemplate the moral issues his narrative raises.

In this he's greatly assisted by the sensitive performances of Brody and Polley. Interestingly Brody, the American member of the cast and a performer of considerable coiled intensity, has largely worked with foreign directors in recent years and with King Kong and Predators has become accustomed to confronting the monstrous face to face. Polley, a Canadian, appeared in Cronenberg's calculatedly emetic eXistenZ, and was herself responsible as writer-director for Away From Her, a remarkable picture about the mind, the soul and personal identity. A sort of highly refined body-horror film, Away From Her gave Julie Christie her best role in recent years. The executive producer of Splice is the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan's Labyrinth is arguably the most original horror movie of this century, and the cinematographer is the Japanese-trained Tetsuo Nagata, who did a fine job on the Piaf biopic La vie en rose.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Jul 2010 | 5:02 pm

Stellar Nursery Revealed Behind Dusty Veil (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The powerful Herschel space telescope has captured an image of a stellar nursery so shrouded by dust that no infrared telescope has been able to see it until now.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 3:15 pm

The Search for Dark Energy has a New Weapon

What is causing the Universe to expand at an accelerated rate? Astronomers have demonstrated a new technique with the largest fully-steerable radio telescope to attack this enduring problem.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Jul 2010 | 1:10 pm

Discovered: The Biggest Rat That Ever Lived (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Watch out Heathcliff, there's a rat out there bigger than you. Or at least there was. Just a couple thousand years ago, the world's largest rat, weighing more than the average house cat, scuttled about what is now East Timor of Southeast Asia.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 1:05 pm

Discovered: The Biggest Rat That Ever Lived

The rodent weighed more than the average house cat.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jul 2010 | 11:37 am

Despite oil, baby turtles being released to Gulf (AP)

AP - Federal biologists are releasing thousands of endangered baby sea turtles into the western Gulf of Mexico, betting that by the time the silver dollar-sized swimmers make it to the oil-fouled waters of the eastern Gulf, BP will have cleaned up its goopy mess.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 11:36 am

Stromboli Volcano Pops Like a Champagne Cork

Stromboli Volcano Pops Like a Champagne Cork
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

BP Ships Return to Gulf as Storm Weakens

Tropical Storm Bonnie weakens and ships prepare to return to work on BP's broken oil well.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Jul 2010 | 8:41 am

Iran launches nuclear fusion bid

Iran begins research aimed at developing a nuclear fusion reactor - an ambition that has proved elusive to physicists for decades.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 24 Jul 2010 | 4:29 am

Space Station Robot Gets To Work

Two years after arriving at the International Space Station, the Canadian-built Dextre robot is ready to get to work.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:58 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Tropical Storm Bonnie was forecast to keep pushing toward the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, while most of the Eastern U.S. remained extremely hot and muggy.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:52 am

Butterflies tracked in UK survey

Conservationists are calling on people to take part in the UK's largest ever butterfly count.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 24 Jul 2010 | 2:46 am